The Jungle Book Reimagined by Tariq Jordan (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The Jungle Book Reimaginedby Tariq Jordan
• Alexandra A. Rego

THE JUNGLE BOOK REIMAGINED. By Tariq Jordan. Directed and choreographed by Akram Khan. Music by Jocelyn Pook. Animation by YeastCulture ( Adam Smith and Nick Hillel). Akram Khan Company, Rose Theater, Lincoln Center. 11 18, 2023.

The Jungle Book Reimaginedpremiered at the Curve (Leicester, UK) in 2022 and has since toured internationally, with further performances booked through January 2025 (Alhambra Theatre, Bradford, UK) at the time of writing. In a 2021 conversation with writer Amitav Ghosh (on "Art, Storytelling, and the Environment") and in numerous journalistic interviews since, director and choreographer Akram Khan relayed his daughter's insistence both on a genderswapped Mowgli and on a production that in effect practiced the ecocritical concerns it preached. Khan and his company went to great lengths to limit the production's carbon footprint, from their sets and props to their rehearsal spaces. The production thus traveled relatively light—the set was composed of various cardboard boxes arranged into specific towers and architectural configurations. Each performance venue involved a new set of boxes taken from local recycling bins and sometimes from storage from the theatre. The linear animations, voiceovers, and Jocelyn Pook's atmospheric, earthy score were transferred and stored digitally.

"There was a jungle," one of the wolves recalled in passing, "but nobody knows when the jungle was, anymore." Indeed, the production opened in water and skyscraper ruins (animated by YeastCulture's Adam Smith and Nick Hillel), in a world where global catastrophic flooding drove inland migration from every coast. Views of animal and human migration, heavy rains, and rising sea levels provided glimpses of various cities before they vanished under the water: the Kremlin, the Oriental Pearl Tower, Big Ben, and the Empire State Building appeared only briefly. This ambiguity elided, or perhaps erased, both temporal and geographic specificity. The scenes of global flooding barely offered enough time to positively identify and locate particular landmarks, let alone time enough to consider where it was that Mowgli washed ashore. These landmarks rose and fell, etched in white light upon a dark green, nearly black backdrop.

Amid this catastrophic milieu, pseudojournalistic reports detailed rising sea levels and corporate profiteering, interspersed with audio clips of climate activist Greta Thunberg. The fact that the production is in the process of an international tour complicated this temporal and geographic ambiguity somewhat: the sight, however brief, of the Empire State Building stirred fellow New Yorkers in the audience. The Jungle Book Reimaginedhad an intriguing relationship with time: it was unclear if the disembodied news reports came from a nearpast or an ongoing present; whether initial animated footage of Mowgli (danced by Pui Yung Shum) and her fellow Indigenous climate refugees served as a preamble or the first chapter.

The production refrained from directly naming its location, troubling any simplistic or total reliance on geographical, architectural, interpersonal, or cultural signifiers. By the time Mowgli arrived on dry land, one might be forgiven for waiting, time and again, for the titular "jungle" to arrive. The animals we are popularly familiar with—Bagheera, Baloo, Kaa—emerged, but from a tangled array of scaffolding and cardboard that supplanted Kipling's dense vegetation. The animals included escaped zoo and circus captives, laboratory subjects, and domesticated pets who made a kind of jungle in the wreckage of an emptied, waterlogged city. The Bandarlog's assembly may have mimicked the House of Parliament (or similar parliamentary governments), and many of the voiceover actors were from the United Kingdom, but Khan's Mowgli certainly did not come from the same place, having traveled across a sea or an ocean to arrive there.

Khan's restitution of Kipling's work acknowledges and problematizes this geographic ambiguity. Jocelyn Pook's atmospheric score and lines delivered in voiceover never arrived in tandem with corresponding choreography. Tracking and attributing specific lines to specific characters (with specific movement categories tracked more easily than their spoken names) offered an unusual temporal framework in which dialogue and its associated narrative began to exist along a different musical and rhythmic timeline than individual characters' movements, instrumental scoring, and the animation. The production's relationship with spoken language also gestured to...